Microsoft Worked Directly With Blizzard To Make Diablo 3 Run At 1080p On Xbox One

Recently, Diablo III: Ultimate Evil Edition was released on Xbox One and it brings with it a host of new features for Blizzard’s isometric action-role-playing game. Back at E3, Blizzard said that Diablo III would run at 900p/60fps on Xbox One for better performance. Microsoft came to know about it and worked directly with Blizzard to boost the resolution to 1080p on Xbox One. In fact, Microsoft released a patch for Xbox One to enable this. 1080p has become a new marketing gimmick for game developers as they highlight it whenever possible to project it as a next generation console. Microsoft didn’t want consumers to experience lower resolution than PS4 for Diablo on Xbox One, so they went directly to the developer to fix this issue.

“We did have 1080p, but we were finding it challenging to keep our frame-rate. Because Diablo’s so much of an action game, we wanted to have a responsive feel – especially with four players. When you get four witch doctors in a room full of demons, that’s probably the worst case scenario for us because we have effects going off everywhere. We want to make sure that it still feels very glassy, very responsive, and that’s why we dropped resolution down on it,” he explained.

“We did find it challenging early on to get it to 1080p. That’s why we made the decision to drop to 900. That’s what we demoed and were showing around E3 time. And Microsoft was just like, ‘This is unacceptable. You need to figure out a way to get a better resolution.’ So we worked with them directly, they gave us a code update to let us get to full 1080p.”

Eurogamer however notes that there is some slight drop in frame rate in high action scenes,

The cause and effect is fairly straightforward. In areas with more enemies and effects – like the Tristram gates battle, or chaotic Act Two overground encounters – we now see frame-rates drop from the locked 60fps seen at 900p to the low 50s. In short, while Blizzard closes the gap between Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in terms of image quality, there are now performance issues that creep in at the game’s extremes while at 1080p. They’re not game-breaking, and many players may not even notice – but it’s clear that a 44 per cent boost to resolution doesn’t come for free: in the same scenarios, the 900p version proved smoother.